Creative musings in bright colors

Posts tagged ‘swatch’

Oops! I meant to post this on Friday but I ended up accidentally throwing a party instead and forgot. Sorry! Anyway, This was just a fun little floral! Fitting for almost-summer.

The new polish here is called Morgan by Zoya. What you see here is three thin coats, although I could have gotten away with two thicker coats. This is a bright blue-leaning pink, and it is quite pretty! I have been hunting for more medium tone pink cremes, and although this one is slightly darker than I was hoping for, the color borders on neon and it was fun to wear.

Hand-painted floral gradient time…happy Spring! It certainly feels like it here, we had a truly impressive lightening storm followed by monsoon-level rain. I spent a large portion of my evening just staring out the window in a dark room!

Anyway, it is also new polish time! This is three coats of Little Oysters by Ethereal Lacquer. This was a limited time buy (from one of the custom groups I am a part of) and I love it! I am actually wearing it (again) as I write this. The polish itself is a bit thick, however it is very opaque and I probably could have gotten away with two coats! It is a greyed-out pastel lilac with copious pink shimmer that shifts to yellow-gold at sharp angles. It looks grey, purple, pink, and sometimes yellow.

I decided I wanted to replicate some of the cool designs I had seen online with this particular stamp, but using purple rather than a multi-color gradient. In retrospect it would have been much easier to actually do a gradient, rather than hand-painting each layer of petals directly on the stamper head! But the end result is pretty cool.

This was was fun. I decided that Apricity looked like magical sparkles (all the little purple glitters and the larger purple squares and the greyed-out background) and so I went with something magical over it. In retrospect I wish I had used a darker stamping polish, but I do kinda love this manicure!

Apricity by Cadillacquer was one of my Thanksgiving weekend buys, and it is super pretty. It is a greyed out teal, think rainy day, but filled with tiny and small glitters of purple plus larger purple squares. I love square glitter. Other than circle glitter it is my absolute favorite. This polish is very jelly-like, so it took 4 coats. This would not generally be something I was pleased by, but due to how thin it was you could see SO MUCH GLITTER DEPTH. It was actually stunning and I will wear it again despite its 4 coat requirement.

I decided that something which looked like magical glitter sparkles (I was having a 12-year-old-girl moment) deserved mythical creatures. So I grabbed a Fairytale plate from MoYou London and went to town with pegasus! Little known fact: pegasus is one of my favorite mythical creatures because it is a standard pretty creature (horse) but with WINGS. Everyone else is always into unicorns. I like things that fly 🙂

This features another of the Zoya polishes that I bought to replace an existing polish; in this case my favorite mid-tone pink is simply empty. I tried to use it on my thumb and couldn’t get enough out of the bottle (although I did end up using a tiny sample size pink that is almost identical for comparison) Unlike my pale pink adventure, this pink polish is not nearly as close in color, nor is it as easy to use!

On my pinky, middle, and pointer fingers I have 3 thick coats of Zoya Kitridge. As it is touted on the website as a “5” and thus totally opaque, this polish is a lot more jelly-like than it should be! It was also supposed to be a bright “barbie” pink, but I honestly think it is too pale for that. It is a pretty enough color, but not what I was looking for! I also have two thin coats of Bubbly by Revlon on my ring finger, and a weird mix on my thumb (one coat of Pink Forever by Sinful Colors before it finally dried up, and one coat of Pinkini by Clinique which is an almost identical color). Regardless, Kitridge is too pale!

Then I went wonky. I decided to make a pink-to-red gradient, but I used a bright red rather than a dark red, and Kitridge is not opaque enough to gradient over Bubbly! So my poor ring finger just does not match. I ended up doing a kind of fun stamp up the middle of the gradient, but honestly I should have picked different colors!

So, overall, this manicure was a bit of a disaster. I blame Kitridge…I had a whole thing planned with a darker pink but it was not going to work with a medium-light pink! *sigh* I wish there were more comparisons on the internet, but at this point there are probably millions of shades and finishes of nail polish and that would be far too much to ask!

This mani is halfway between winter and spring: winter colors but with flowers and a butterfly! Given how cold (and snowy) it continues to be, I thought that was fitting.

This is a new-to-me polish, and I love it. For some reason I am super into shimmers right now, and this is subtle, elegant, and loaded with shimmer! What you see here is three thin coats of Quixotic Polish – It Rubbed Off From Friction. This polish is one of my only purchases from Hella Handmade Creations (I usually stick to Polish Pickup). The polish is is a beautiful dark grey-mauve swimming with pink shimmer, which also has a scattering of holo glitter. That said, while I love the color of the polish, it was a little thick and hard to work with.

I then made some stamping decals/advanced stamping (aka coloring the stamp in while it is on the stamper) using silver and purple. The color combo could have been a bit better, but it wasn’t terrible. I rather wish I had used black not silver! Or maybe simply white.

In case you can’t tell, the theme this year was “slightly unusual Valentine’s day art”, so I ended up with a lot of “love” and a lot of purple :-p. The fun thing here is the purple-on-purple background stamp (you can see it best on my ring finger) and THEN the purple to white gradient stamping. Basically lots of stamps!

The base color here is Lael by Zoya, a very dark blue-leaning purple cream. As with most Zoya creams, Lael is opaque in two thin coats, and is predictably a dream to work with. I should at some point do a comparison of all my dark purple Zoya cremes (I think I own 3 very similar ones at this point) but this is the darkest in my collection! My other darkest purple Zoya Monica, looks greyed-out in comparison to the intense dark purple of Lael.

There is one more Valentines manicure in the wings for Monday (which only makes sense since my husband and I are celebrating on Sunday…at the moment I am on a day shift and he is on a nights shift so we hardly see each other!). Hope you enjoyed!

This mani is a bit of nail art, some swatching, and a small amount of comparison. When Zoya did their New Years sale, I bought 4 new polishes that I intended to replace some terrible polishes that I own, and to fill a few gaps. This is the first of them!

What you see here are three thin coats of Jordan. I bought this polish to replaced Tickled Pink by Wet n’ Wild which takes 4 coats and is incredibly thick. I wanted to compare the two, so I put Tickled Pink on my ring finger, and Jordan on all the others. I cannot tell the difference! Which is to say that the swatches of Jordan online are accurate. I was hoping Jordan would be a two-coater, but for a pastel 3 isn’t terrible. This is just a nice pastel pink creme. No frills.

I then added a gradient, and stamped a tiny pink heart near my cuticle. Super easy, but quite pretty! I do wish I had started the gradient a biiit close to my free edge, but it still looks nice! It was a really quite fitting manicure to wear right before Valentine’s day…so I hope you guys all have a great (and chocolate-filled) tomorrow!

How about a not-quite-traditional valentine’s day mani, for all that I think I’ve used this particular stamp at least once a year, and typically ON valentines day!

The base color here is Zoya Payton, a purple scattered holo. The base is a bit more pink-leaning, and hilariously (or not) enough it is an almost perfect dupe for TWO other polishes in my collection. I love jewel tone purples, its a problem! That said, Payton covered very well in two thicker coats and my others take three coats. However, if you happen to on LA Girl Purple Effect…you don’t need Payton. Oops!

I decided that Payton alone was not enough, so I dry marbled on a bit of LA Girl Purple Effect (which is why I know they are basically perfect dupes) and Milani Hi-Res. It was still a bit subtle…so I decided to stamp with a silver holo instead of just a silver like I had planned!

The end effect was dizzying, and you can barely see the pattern of the stamp over all the purple holo! It was still fun to wear, but I need to remember to use a creme to stamp over glitters, not another glitter! Stay tuned for more quasi-valentine’s day manis this week 🙂

I got a new polish! Well, new to me at least. This polish has been out for years but it wasn’t cheap enough to be worth it to me until black friday. Anyway, Have some shiny silver flowery swirls over blue!

The new polish is Dream by Zoya. Now, I own a LOT of dark blue holo polishes. Probably 5 or so. If I am being honest, this polish is not all that unique in my collection of other dark teal-leaning blue holos…EXCEPT that it paints like a dream! I actually compared it to Downpour by ILNP (which I wore concurrently on my other hand) and the Zoya was much easier and more opaque (it did lack that deep metallic luster of the ILNP, but still). This is a nice jewel-toned teal-leaning dark blue holo. The holo is in shards, and unlike Blaze (the wine-red of similar finish) Dream still appears holographic with top coat. I love it!

I have been meaning to combine the weird stone patterns from Make Your Mark 02 with something swirly. Its a quite fun mix! Also, these were painted before it got quite so cold out (as I write this it is 13 degrees fahrenheit) so currently my nails are tiny nibs. My nails always break so much in the winter!

That’s it for today! New polish, long nails, and some sparkles. Today is also (hopefully) the last day of my boarding exam, and assuming I passed, one of the last major exams I have to take before I am fully licensed!

So, being honest, I don’t love this mani. I was a little pressed for time and wanted to both stamp something cool, and use the colors that the nail polish base was designed after. Since the polish is called You Look Like Seafood in honor of Tamatoa from Moana, that meant fuchsia and gold. And unfortunately, this is where I ended up!

This is three thin coats of You Look Like Seafood! by Dreamland polish. I love love LOVE this nail polish…the blue base, the pink shimmer, the flakies, the whole thing is stunning. I also really only needed two coats, I added the third just for a bit more depth. That said, I hate the brush on the polish! There was no way NOT to flood my pinky as the brush was both wide and not curved. 😦

This was also the first time I played with the Moyra Cuts plate, I have used it many times since but I was still working with how to stamp large swatches here! Luckily my polishes were quite opaque :-p. Hope you enjoyed this more than I did!

You guys, I am terrible! I am sorry it has been a week since my last post…I just didn’t have time to put together any of this since then! I was at my in-laws for Christmas and then my sister (and her adorable puppy) came to visit me, and there wasn’t time for photo editing! I am wearing the same design on my nails that I placed a week ago. A WEEK. And it is chipped and awful. Sorry nails!

Anyway, this design was supposed to be candy canes, and was intended to go up last Wednesday just after Christmas. I failed. But I am going to post it anyway!

The base color here is three thin coats of Aphrodite by Zoya, which is a pretty orange-leaning bright red with glitter, but unfortunately is not QUITE opaque. I will likely end up using this as a jelly rather than a glitter crelly due to the three coat problem! But I love how bright it is. I bought Aphrodite (and like 15 other polishes) during black friday/cyber monday deals.

I don’t know what I was aiming for with this mani! I wanted something that looked cold and windy (it snowed for the first time on Friday, and is supposed to snow again today) and it felt appropriate! I started with a grey-white shimmery base and added some stamped swirls, and then colored them in. I don’t know if this was the best idea, or if I should have gone for some creme polishes to color in the wind!

Regardless, the base color her is a new polish called Sandy by KBShimmer. It is from the August PPP. The swatches I saw made it look beautiful, which it is, but I didn’t look correctly at the layer count. This is three THICK coats, and the second time I wore it, it took 4 coats! No one has time for that. So, while I do like how it looks, I think I am relegating it to a topper. Fail.

That said, the polish is a pretty pale grey with lots of purple shimmer than shits to blue, and tons of silver holo shards. I am currently into polishes with silver shards, for whoever reason! The base is a crelly for ease of sparkle, but I know (because I own) crellys that are 2-3 coats and not 3-4 coats. This polish is not easy to use.

This idea got into my head and I just had to run with it! I wanted to make a purple-white-floral overlay, and then add a rectangular stud to make it look like they were being buckled together. Ta-da!

I made nail art using the full nail water decal that you see spread across the tips of my nails here, but honestly I like the way this came out better. Don’t get me wrong, the whole decal is stunning, but there is something about this mani that keeps me coming back to it.

Also the base color here is yet another polish pickup pack shade, this is called Just One Look by Painted Polish, and it is from the August options. This is three thin coats and I adore this polish! It goes on a little thick, but the pastel purple is stunning and I love the linear holo background with the larger holo glitters!

The born pretty store is having a rather impressive sale right now, so you can find this set of decals (with two others) on sale for 99 cents here! Gotta say, I love that these are opaque and yet thin, so if you are into decals I recommend them! Enjoy!

I’ve been doing so much stamping (mostly due to lack of time) that I haven’t been using many of my inspiration photos recently! This is another stamping day, but this one comes with inspiration, and is super glittery.

Years ago, I saw this stained glass mani at Emily de Molly and I died inside. I wanted the polish and the stamp and the whole thing. I finally bought the stamping plate, and thanks to the Polish Pickup Pack, I owned the perfect polish. This mani makes me so happy!

What you see here are three thin coats of Playing With Fire, which is a black opal inspired polish by Ever After. It is stunning! Black jelly base loaded with orange, red and a few green color-shifting flakes as well as tiny blue holographic hex glitters and even tinier green microglitter squares. I hope this polish is easier to take off than it looks, because it looks like a glitterbomb, but all the glitter is flakies!

Unfortunately, the polish is no longer available since it was one of the January polish pickup options, but since I’ve been buying 1-3 polishes per month with polish pickup, I have no shortage of incredible new polishes to play with!

I know it isn’t spring anymore, but I got the PERFECT base color and I just had to make this! I’ll likely do it again next year so it fits :-D. Also, flower day anyone? 😀

This awesome design was inspired by ruthsnailart which I have recently become obsessed with. If we are being honest, I added too many cherry blossoms (I like her slightly more minimalist design) but this still looks pretty epic!

The base is a stunning periwinkle blue/purple polish with copious pink-gold shimmer and silver flakies called Traverse the Skies by Emily de Molly. I have had my eyes on this polish ever since it came out, and it does not disappoint! I love it. It is super interesting (both in terms of color and finish), and is just close enough to purple that I’ve also already worn it to the hospital. This is three thin coats, although I probably could have gotten away with two if I was more careful.

What you probably can’t tell is that there are THREE colors of brown in the tree branches (and an additional three colors of pink in the blossoms) and putting this all together took longer than I thought it would. That said, it was worth it! I am impressed.

Happy Monday! No really, I mean it. Today is a good day because I start on an elective block tomorrow which means I get such things like WEEKENDS and NOT WORKING 30 HOUR CALL SHIFTS. It’s amazing. Anyway, on to nail art! In celebration of my new found freedom, this week I’m going to be posting some recent favorites that I’ve saved up, starting with this sparkly floral piece!

The base polish here is two thin coats of Holidazed Over You by OPI. This polish is a very very dark blue creme…so dark it is basically black. That said, the polish is almost a one coater! I always need more super opaque blacks (even if this IS blue), and having one in a tiny mini bottle will be useful, even if I’m just going to pretend it’s black. Oh well!

I then went and covered the polish with holographic iridescent foil from the Born Pretty Store. Most of my foil is single sheets, but this particular pattern is an entire roll! This is great because the design is fairly awesome: an array of dots with a rainbow shifting wave running through! As I tilt my nails the swirl shifts up, down, left, and right. The rainbows are incredible! I got 98% dot transfer which is really impressive. I did add a few of the missing dots using a silver metallic polish, but I think across all 5 nails I only had to add maybe 10 dots total? So win for both the foil and the foil glue!

In my continuing need to test all things related to using foil on my nails, I went hunting for a way to make foil manis last longer. The last time I used foil, I only covered it with aqua base (water-based base coat intended for some persnickety holographic polishes…and the only water-based anything that I own, unfortunately) and in the shower the whole thing started to crack and flake off! Which means it worked great for about 5 hours and then became kinda really ugly. So, this time I covered with Seche Vite after the aqua base…. and it totally worked! The aqua base seems to protect the finish and shimmer of the foil, while Seche Vite does its job and protects the mani from such hazards as water and daily life.

I kinda wish I had taken a video (not that I actually know how to get them onto the blog, but still) just so you guys could see the shifty wave pattern. It was fun! But then I decided it wasn’t enough.

I for some reason really wanted to throw on some roses over the dots! I was initially going to use layered stamping, but all the rose plates that I have contain flowers that were larger than I wanted to go with…so freehand roses it was! It’s been a while since I last freehanded flowers (yet somehow the posts I’ve put together for the next few weeks have a lot of flowers? I don’t know, I guess I lump them together thematically. Anyway), and these came out pretty good for all that I am out of practice!

That’s all for today! You can pick up the roll of shifty holographic dot foil for 99 cents at the Born Pretty Store. I am super a fan! Then all you need is some freehand roses and voila! Super fun mani, if I do say so myself. Hope you enjoyed!

Omg you guys. YOU GUYS. So, first off, I am super freaking proud because LOOK I DID A FOIL TRANSFER. Now, I cannot totally lay claim to this, because everything in this mani is new…new base polish, new foil transfer glue, new foils. Somehow, it worked!

To start with, the base color is two thin coats of Landon by Zoya, a mid-tone slightly dusty purple creme. The polish is pretty enough, but honestly I prefer my mid-toned purple with a pink (or even true purple) tint and not grey-out like this! Anyway, Landon is pretty enough but a bit more wintry than I am currently feeling!

However, then I added holographic foil. Because. And it is amazing. I requested some holographic nail foils from the Born Pretty Store when they asked me what I wanted to review most recently, and I asked for foil glue as well since previously I had used regular nail polish. The foil glue was a bit…tricky. I tried to just paint it on but it shrunk to just the center of my nails. So I tried to paint it on thickly and it kinda worked…so I just gave up and dapped it on a few times in places that it wasn’t covering. Despite the headache of doing things that way, it dried quickly and clearly covered all right!

I then cut the foil I wanted to use (this set comes with 12 designs….three of which were a little poorly printed and looked blob-y and the rest of which were awesome) and went and applied the foil once the glue was completely dry. Ta-da! These worked basically perfectly. I smushed them down with a makeup sponge instead of just using my finger, and I think that helped.

So, you can find 12 foil designs, of which this is one, at the Born Pretty Store for $1.79, and the foil glue for $5.29. Hope you enjoyed! I know I did 😀

So, when I said a week ago that that purple was my last new polish I lied. Technically I painted these nails before the others, but I had forgotten to post them! So here, have some more purple and fun splatter stamps.

What you see here are two thin coats of Isadora by Zoya, a purple metallic with pink shimmer. When I went through and did the polish comparisons I thought it was similar to the lovely Giada…but different enough that I obviously needed to keep them both 😀 I love deep purple metallics.

I ended up double stamping over Isadora using two images from the Make Your Mark 02 plate. These images just seem infinitely combinable! I used my most pigmented purple holo first and then a pale pink….before I added top coat you could easily see the outline of the purple holo but once I added the top coat it kinda melted into the background!

At angles I could still pick out where the holo polish was…and then I noticed that the overlaying pink had turned bright purple! So I guess Berry Good Looking bleeds color (I think I knew that and had just forgotten) but in this setting it looked really cool!

You guys, I just had a DAY (but Eva, it’s only 3pm! Yes but I woke up at 5:30, so it’s been a whole day and I am over it). Which means that today’s post will be short and sweet because I mostly want to bang my head into a wall. Repeatedly. And this mani? Not helping.

The base here is three coats of Delaney by Zoya. In the bottle this has a bit of a duochrome/multichrome finish, but that did not translate to the nail (which was pretty much as expected). This is, I think, the last of my haul from winning the Nail Art Canada holiday challenge…and of all the Zoya polishes I received, this is the one I was least excited about. So it went lest. This polish is basically a muted dull metallic purple, and I already have Zoya Gadia, which is amazing. So yah, this is three thin coats, and it looks fine but I have prettier version of this in my stash already.

For the design, I ended up doing a purple-to-white lace stamping gradient, getting bored, and adding a metric ton of dots! I think I went overboard I really need to stop trying to do lace gradients over purple, this is probably the third time I have tried something like this, and to date I have liked none of them!

And that’s all for today! I know it isn’t great, but I’m working off my backlog. This one and the next post are just not my favorites, but then it should get good again (I tend to edit the photos in waves of things-I-love and things-I-dislike, and we are in a dislike wave, Monday’s post was the end of a love wave). Ok. Too much train of thought. Enjoy!

Sorry you guys! My posting schedule remains wonky…just because I haven’t edited any photos yet! I’ll try to get back on track. In the meanwhile, enjoy this really weird kinda floral mani with a really pretty base!

I don’t really know what I was thinking with this design. The polish I used as a base is super pretty but very busy, so I decided to throw three metallics on top of it? Not one of my best ideas.

Anyway, the base here is three thin coats of From the Land of Oz by Polished for Days. Unfortunately, my camera is not capturing the lavender-purple base of this polish, the camera likes to think it is more blue. I only used three coats for more glitter depth, it was full coverage in two. This polish is from Polish Pickup, so isn’t available anymore…but if you aren’t yet you should all go join PPU! This coming month is a revival of past favorites and a LOT of my very favorites are coming back, so if you missed something this would be a great time to pick it up!